Doctoral Dissertation Research: Minority Youth and Everyday Negotiations of Place and Marginalization

长期以来，研究人员和政策制定者一直有兴趣了解在贫困社区长大如何影响少数民族青年的生活前景。 随着富裕社区和贫困社区之间的差距扩大，以及年轻人仍然被困在贫困的城市社区，了解地方如何塑造年轻人的愿望和对未来的看法再次变得至关重要。 该项目将通过分析城市少数民族青年对他们社区的了解以及他们如何利用这些知识来评估他们未来的选择和机会来解决这些问题。 鉴于以地方为基础的方案和政策的扩散，以造福于边缘化社区的青年，该项目将提供及时的，与政策有关的信息，空间因素最有影响力的结构青年人的愿望和成年的道路。 因此，该项目的调查结果将为最近成为联邦政府支持的选择社区计划的一部分的社区内发生的城市改革提供信息。 该项目还将有助于努力制定基于地点的指标，以反映青年人获得机会的情况和实现向上流动的前景。 此外，通过将年轻人的知识和看法定位为分析地点影响的核心，该项目将产生理论见解，进一步加深我们对特定地点如何在塑造年轻人的生活和生活过程中发挥重要作用的理解。在这样做的过程中，它将有助于推进对生命历程转变的地理研究，并推动对邻里效应的社会学研究，以解释在边缘化社区长大的日常经历。该项目融合了儿童地理，社会流动和生命历程研究的文学作品，以研究年轻人的愿望是如何通过他们在日常生活中的经历塑造的。 从概念上讲，该项目将年轻人的社区界定为形成性的地理区域，他们在其中吸收有关其日常环境的信息，并利用这些知识来评估他们及其邻居可以获得的机会和途径。 这项研究将探讨年轻人的日常环境如何通过将参与者观察与访谈相结合来形成，以研究非洲裔美国人和拉丁美洲人/青年对他们的社区了解了什么，以及如何与他们如何规划生活的方式联系起来。 这些方法将使研究人员能够收集关于年轻人对周围的人、地方和空间的所见、所听、所言和所感的深入的人种学信息，并观察他们收到的关于如何成长和在生活中取得成功的信息和建议。 还将与社区成员、教师和物业经理进行半结构化访谈，他们帮助年轻人构建他们社区的经验。 总之，这种方法论的方法提供了必要的空间化的角度来分析城市少数民族青年如何理解他们在生活中的起点，并评估从他们特定的社会和空间位置获得成功的可能途径。

Researchers and policy makers have long been interested in understanding how growing up in impoverished neighborhoods impacts the life prospects of minority youth. As the gap between affluent and impoverished neighborhoods widens and as young adults remain stuck in poor urban communities, it has once again become imperative to understand how place shapes young people's aspirations and perceptions of their future. This project will address these questions by analyzing what urban minority youth learn about their community and how they use this knowledge to assess their future options and opportunities. Given the proliferation of place-based programs and policies geared to benefit youth in marginalized communities, this project will provide timely, policy-relevant information about the spatial factors most influential to structuring young people's aspirations and pathways to adulthood. The findings from this project will therefore inform urban reforms taking place within neighborhoods that have recently become part of a federally supported Choice Neighborhood program. The project will also contribute to efforts to create place-based indicators that capture young people's access to opportunities and prospects of attaining upward mobility. Additionally, by positioning young people's knowledge and perceptions as central to analyzing the effects of place, this project will generate theoretical insight that furthers our understanding of how particular places take on significance in shaping young people's lives and life course. In doing so, it will help advance geographical research on life course transitions and push sociological research on neighborhood effects to account for the everyday experience of growing up in a marginalized community. The project blends literature from children's geography, social mobility, and life course studies to examine how young people's aspirations are shaped through their experiences in and of everyday places. Conceptually, the project frames young people's communities as formative geographies, learning spaces wherein they are absorbing information about their everyday surroundings and using this knowledge to evaluate the opportunities and pathways that are available to them and to people from their neighborhood. The study will explore how young people's everyday surroundings become formative by combining participant observations with go-along interviews to examine what African American and Latino/a youth have learned about their community and how that links to the way how they plan their lives. These methods will enable the researchers to gather in-depth, ethnographic information about what young people see, hear, say, and feel about the people, places, and spaces around them and observe the messages and advice they receive about how to grow up and get ahead in life. Semi-structured interviews will also be conducted with community members, teachers, and property managers who help construct young people's experiences of their community. Taken together, this methodological approach provides the spatialized perspective necessary to analyze how urban minority youth make sense of where they start out in life and evaluate what the possible pathways to success are from their particular social and spatial location.